Foreword

IT IS DIFFICULT even to set forth the libertarian ideal, but expounding it is simple compared to living by it. Nonetheless, life lived according to right principles can never be more than sporadic except as the ideal is sought for, held up, and used as a guide.

I have no reason for attempting a manual of libertarian leadership except the conviction—born of three decades of trial and error—that our waning individual liberty is more difficult to restore than most people judge. It would be shameful for any person, thinking he knows how deep the ore lies, to keep silent while millions of people wastefully prospect on the surface.

First, a word about terms. I use freedom and liberty as synonyms, that is, interchangeably. A case has been made for ascribing different values to these terms but the distinction, if any, is never generally understood and, thus, is more or less useless for communicative purposes.

The term libertarian is used because nothing better has been found to replace liberal, a term that has been most successfully appropriated by contemporary authoritarians. As long as liberal meant liberation from the authoritarian state, it was a handy and useful generalization. It has come to mean little more than state liberality with other people’s money.

Next, the solution to the problem of rescuing an individual liberty on the skids requires, broadly speaking, the mastery of two disciplines: the philosophy of freedom and the methodology of freedom. The former has to do with an understanding of what freedom actually is, and the latter with the techniques, means, and methods by which an improved state of freedom may be effected.

The emphasis in this volume is on methodology. Assuming an individual has mastered the philosophical aspects of freedom, what can he do about it? With whom does he work? What are his limitations? His potentialities?

Methodology must not be sold short. Indeed, if everyone—freedom devotees and their opposites—had his method right, there would be no real philosophical problem. Right method, according to this thesis, consists of self-improvement. If everyone were devoted to the perfection of self, there could be no meddlers amongst us, and without meddlers there could be no socialism.

Of course, philosophy and methodology cannot be compartmented, entirely. To be a master of liberty’s rationale one must, to be consistent, behave in a libertarian manner. One cannot, for instance, stand truly for liberty and regard as villains or fools those who disagree, without qualifying as an intellectual authoritarian!

So, throughout this volume there will be traces of philosophy for, without some of it, the methods would be attached to no purpose. Perhaps to establish an author-reader understanding at the outset, an important philosophical definition is in order:

Liberty, like laissez faire, is often thought of as synonymous with unrestrained action. The thought is incorrect as related to both terms. Liberty, for instance, does not and cannot include any action, regardless of sponsorship, which lessens the liberty of a single human being. To argue contrarily is to claim that liberty can be composed of liberty negations. Patently absurd! Unrestraint carried to the point of impairing the liberty of others is the exercise of license, not liberty. To minimize the exercise of license is to maximize the area of liberty. Ideally, government would restrain license, not indulge in it; make it difficult, not easy; disgraceful, not popular. A government that does otherwise is licentious, not libertarian.

Finally, this volume contains little that is new, except the arrangement. Most of the material has appeared over the past five years in books and pamphlets, some of it in The Freeman and Notes from FEE, publications of The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. This is an attempt to organize the numerous materials into a single, usable manual for those who would give liberty a hand.

L. E. R.